Numerous studies across a variety of industries find that rudeness negatively impacts creativity, performance, and team morale. Not to mention, it increases employee turnover and drives customers away. Apply those consequences to the high-risk, high-stress environment of healthcare delivery (where we face a shortage of doctors and high competition for patients), and the implications are concerning.

Shifting mindsets to create a high-functioning emergency department team is about much more than setting metric goals. In fact, that is a very small part of the effort. Most of the meaningful and effective work is listening, aligning your team around a shared mission, educating your team on the importance of the metrics, and engaging the team in setting goals and creating a strategy to improve performance.

No matter the performance issue an emergency department faces, the solution to that issue is invariably culture change. When an emergency department leader focuses on culture first and aligns the team around a culture of service, performance improves.  

Kindness is contagious, and unkindness is perhaps even more contagious. The ripple effect of the culture of your team—the way you treat one another—touches every single aspect of your business from physician retention and patient experience, to operational efficiency and patient outcomes. 

Even the most experienced, highest quality physicians face risk of litigation. Fortunately, there are key areas hospitalists can focus to not only deliver better patient experience, but also avoid lawsuits.

In my experience as a hospitalist, I have found that there are a few key issues that are crucial to discuss with my ED counterparts. This is a list of the most common issues to address that help foster smoother transitions of care.

Peer review, when done right, has the power to improve patient care, boost service quality, and decrease the frequency of sentinel events.

This department had a culture issue that was woven tightly into the traditional culture of healthcare delivery. It is one I felt strongly about unraveling: hierarchal, top-down leadership.

The idea that a hospitalist program is cost prohibitive for smaller community hospitals (less than 12,000 annual emergency department visits) is a dated myth.